Motion #19

Green Party Women

Strategic Aims

During our first meeting this year, the GPW Committee identified four key strategic aims to guide our work:

1. Belonging

We want Green Party Women to be a space where women can feel connected with each other and with the wider Party.

• Book Club – We have held monthly meetings where we alternated between fiction and non-fiction texts, always by a female author.
• Green Witchers – Our birding (and more!) group has met regularly and discussed a variety of topics concerning wildlife and the environment.

1. For Women and Planet
   The importance of both ecology and politics is the reason that we have joined the Green Party.

Project Highlights:
Key campaigns and events have included:

• The Truth About Zane – At our Make Change Happen event in April, we learned the tragic story behind this campaign which we have regularly promoted on our website and in our newsletters. Elizabeth Mansfield, proposed a motion for conference, entitled “Zane’s Law”, which addresses the crisis of contaminated land in the UK. We were delighted that Conference voted to endorse the motion.
• Restore Nature Now – our website and social media (SM) team promoted this event and members of the GPW committee took our banner to London where we met some of our members and joined over 60,000 people from across the UK.
• March for Clean Water –Members of the committee will be taking our banner to London on 3 November and will take part in the march.
• Social Media and website – We have supported campaigns such as Plastic Free July and the Big Butterfly Count and celebrated days such as World Rainforest Day.

1. Raising Women’s Voices
   We believe that women need to be at the heart of the Green Party.

Highlights:

• Make Change Happen – Anne Gayfer, Policy Development Co-ordinator, talked to our members about the work of the Policy Development Committee and policy working groups and explained how policy is made within the Green Party
• Green Women in Action – We have used our newsletter to highlight the huge range of work carried out by women within the Green Party.
• CEDAWinLAW – on our SM, website and in our newsletters, we have promoted this campaign to fight for justice for 50s women who were negatively affected by State Pension Age changes.
• Election Support – in both the May local elections and in the General Election, we promoted female Green Party candidates
• Centenary Action/Elect Her – we have supported these campaigns to increase representation of women in Parliament and GPW attended their June event in London.

1. Violence Against Women and Girls

Our SM team regularly highlight this issue and both our SM and newsletters feature Calls to Action by encouraging our members to support campaigns, sign petitions and respond to consultations.

In November, we are holding a webinar which will feature a conversation between Elizabeth Mansfield and an Afghan women’s rights activist.

Social Media and Website

We post every single day and continued to do this during the period when we were effectively shut down by GPEW from November to February. Our followers on Twitter/X and on Facebook have increased as has the engagement with our website.

Highlights: in addition to the campaigns described above, we celebrated Women’s History Month by celebrating a different inspirational woman each day throughout March.

Equality, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Green Party Women organised two events with Hamza Egal, the Green Party’s EEDI Manager – a focus group session and Unconscious Bias training. Both were well attended and members welcomed the opportunity to be able to speak freely about issues which concerned them.

We produced a written response to the EEDI Manager’s report and shared this with our members.

Representatives of GPW attend meetings of the Equality and Diversity Committee to ensure that the interests of women are taken into account.

Monthly Meetings and Accountability

The Green Party Women Committee meets regularly, generally on the 2nd Monday of each month. All meetings are open to observers and are advertised via our newsletters and in the Green Party Women Space on Green Spaces.

We have held Open Mic sessions at the end of each meeting where any member is free to raise issues of interest or concern.

We email agendas to our members in advance of our meetings and email minutes of meetings and officers’ reports in the next newsletter following each committee meeting.

These and other important documents are uploaded to the Green Party Women Space as a record of our work and to make them accessible to all members. However, during the summer, these were deleted without consultation or prior warning.

Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM)

Following the shut down of Green Party Women last year, some minor changes were made to our constitution as stipulated by GPEW’s Standing Orders Committee.

Although SOC did not require us to consult with our members, we felt it was essential to offer members an opportunity to discuss these imposed minor changes. Our members voted to ratify the changes at our June EGM.

Annual General Meeting (AGM)

We had two guest speakers at our September AGM which took place at GPEW Conference.

Loppy Oubridge (GPW committee member) shared her experiences of campaigning for peace as a Greenham Woman and Amanda Onwuemene (GPEW councillor, Chair of Greens of Colour and GPEW spokesperson for Policing and Domestic Violence) talked about a number of issues affecting women and girls such as misogyny within the police and the psychology of narcissism. Both speakers were very well received and members present responded with thoughtful questions.

This was followed by the business part of the AGM.

GPW ran a stall each day at Conference. We had many sign ups for membership and had some great discussions.

Challenges

Our greatest challenge this year has been the loss of so many valued members of our committee.

This began with the No-Fault Suspension of our Co-Chair Jude in March, the 4th successive ‘gender critical’ Co-Chair of Green Party Women to be put on NFS.

Later this year, Jude was told that she had ‘forfeited’ her membership for five years; in effect, she had been expelled. The same fate befell Sue Williams who was serving her 2nd term as GPW Secretary, Hazel (Membership Secretary), Amanda Stones (non-portfolio and then acting Co-Chair while Jude was on NFS) and Rachel Hardy (non-portfolio).

Future Steps

The loss of hard working, skilled members of the Green Party Women committee has made it more difficult for the remaining members to work effectively and to promote our strategic aims but we are determined to rise to the challenge.

We were all elected on a platform of promoting the interests of women and girls and of supporting our sex based rights. We believe that the committee members we have lost were targeted and discriminated against because of their gender critical beliefs and we know that we too are at risk because of our beliefs. But that won’t deter us from speaking up to promote the needs and interests of women and girls within the Green Party of England and Wales and beyond.